Bethesda’s Todd Howard made headlines recently when he told Famitsu official mod support is coming to Starfield in 2024. The dev team narrowed that down even further to early 2024 in today’s hotfix patch notes.
Here’s what Howard recently had to say about when mods are coming in response to a question about mods (via Google translate):
“Once you can mod it, you will be able to do almost anything, just like in previous works. Mod support will be available next year, but we love it too, so we’ll do it in a big way.”
And here’s what Bethesda wrote in their patch notes for today’s small hotfix (emphasis mine):
“Additionally, we are working on our built-in mod support (Creations) that will work across all platforms similar to what we’ve done with Skyrim and Fallout 4. This full support is planned to launch early next year.”
This timeline would be similar to how long it took for official mod support to hit Fallout 4. In my post covering Starfield Xbox mods, I mentioned how it was about five months between Fallout 4’s release date and the release of Creation Kit (official mod support). Five months from Starfield’s release date would put us in early February.
Barring any hiccups, we should see Creation Kit for Starfield released sometime in the first half of 2024. Don’t be shocked if it takes slightly longer than we saw with Fallout 4. The holiday season is right around the corner, and hopefully, the dev team will get a much-needed break. Plus, Starfield is Bethesda’s first game to run on Creation Engine 2. This is a new iteration of the Creation Engine used on Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bethesda took a little longer to get their mod tools out the door.
In the meantime, the modding community wastes no time adding mods on their own. Within days of Starfield’s launch, the number of mods quickly surpassed 700, with more than 100 added daily. As of this article, that number stands at more than 1,600 mods.
This number will keep growing for years to come. Take Fallout 4. On Nexus Mods (a popular website for downloading mods), there are more than 48,000 mods. On Bethesda’s website (mods that support Creation Kit), that number stands at more than 29,000, with 16,000+ available on Xbox.